Sand Theory: Poems

This Heaven

10 This Heaven This heaven feels homeless and requires love more than ever now, as do the gangs of pigeons growing in numbers like the unemployed and the foreclosed houses up and down Westnedge Avenue themselves homeless and out of work, even the furniture looking evicted, downcast shoppers at the downscale midtown grocery store where all races meet like prizefighters on the head of a pin, the angels we call clerks, one love, one life, one dread looking out of their kindness, more angels along with me pushing empty cans into the giant machines of RETURN not far from the red peppers stacked in pyramids like giant bloody molars. I’m spooked that I relish living for those few suspended instants when money changes hands and I find myself exchanging good wishes with a person no less strange than myself. In this heaven, that I am talking to myself so much is as heartbreaking as the neighbor across the street who picks up every twig on her sidewalk because secretly she wishes to put a tree back together. Instead she gathers them one by one and in handfuls drops them into a Yard Waste Only bin and goes on speechlessly living. While I am somehow suspended between the verbal and the nonverbal, especially when I am walking downhill to the grocery store. Then people without cars look like pedestrian statues, arms to their sides. They look like art might be winning the millennium. What is it about these people, they look up at me sometimes as if they had heard a church bell, then go back to trying to stare themselves back inside me, a person I know, who for all his debased loneliness is preferable to a religion of brass. He could be sitting next to a woman reading in a subway under any foreign city, her book so close to her eyes he can almost hear the words. The news today is how we will again be swept into history. 11 We will weep blood and beer and mud, we will have to walk away from all the forgotten. Some of us will be ordered to stand frozen in our tracks, some of us will spring leaks from standing in fountains, some of us have been standing on pediments ever since this heaven began turning into stone ordinary losers, ordinary winners, happy as me at times, with average cares, Lotto faces, Lotto hands, Lotto-gray eyes rubbed clean for the exhilarations of the losing numbers, all in this heaven where hope winds us up and we march around because in this heaven hope can never get enough of itself. Not in the train station with the ticketless bums and dopeheads and any others changed not just utterly, as Yeats had it, but forever, by which I mean mortally beyond daylit thoughts of elections and eternal revelations, in the light of snow, under the available noon shadow of the Rickman House, flushed out, sacked, sent packing from picturesque wooden benches, looking like unoccupied movie extras in a docu-poem about poverty. The camera stops wheezing and the writer and the readers fall asleep. In a bar I like because my colleagues wouldn’t think to go there, I find myself drinking iced tea seated across a table set with two paper place mats that double as menus from a student with the tattoo of a heavenly gun or cross or flower or barbed wire up her arm all the way up a still-alabaster neck telling me the money just think of the money blown on smack only to give most of it away to anyone with a steel needle and a hummingbird’s self-precise addiction, looking from across the table at a hopelessly AWOL father figure. My self, my dear, my poor entirely helpless excuse of a mentor. All I can say since she can’t afford the therapy that got me back on my feet is read novels, and if you can’t do that, watch movies, take an interest in narratives other than your own and don’t shut out your stupefying friends, they need your love, they look up at you dumbly even when they talk down to you. I err in my tacit reassurance to her that it is absolutely natural to err. 12 But her face also seems perfect, that is, unchangeable, stamped, locked, one of the many perfectly unphased...